Knierim Lab Discovers New Role for Brain Region Critical for Memory

The lab of Professor of Neuroscience James Knierim in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute published a paper in Science that discovered a new role of the Lateral Entorhinal Cortex (LEC)—one of the gateways of information into the hippocampal memory system. The paper’s lead authors, Cheng Wang and Xiaojing Chen, showed that the LEC encodes experience from a first-person (egocentric) perspective, in contrast to the world-centered (allocentric) coding of place cells, grid cells, and head direction cells. This discovery supports the idea that the LEC conveys information about the sensory content of an organisms’ experience, which the hippocampus binds within the allocentric maps provided by grid cells and place cells to form the basis of an episodic memory of an event within its spatiotemporal context.